Respite!

Every so often (but not for very much longer) one has a heart stopping moment when the world seems to slip out of your grasp and chaos is come again!  This morning was one of those times when I opened my bleary eyes and saw after a moment’s pause that it was daylight.

Daylight!  Bright daylight!  Late!  The lurch to panicked action was, thankfully only momentary before I realized (or at least I thought I realized) that it was the weekend and I did not have to stagger away and make myself presentable for the pampered darlings of the rich.

Although I sank back onto the pillow with considerable relief, I also had a nagging doubt about the day.  In the deeply ingrained sense of puritan denial that is a birthright of all true Britons I suspected that the concept of the “weekend” might have been something planted in my mind by the Central Protection System of the brain trying to protect me from the ravages of marking.  Or, more likely, it was a cunning double-bluff from the Delayed Gratification and Associated Guilt Centre of the brain lulling me into a false sense of security only to snigger with delight when reality punches you in the stomach.  Either way I lay in an uneasy crouch waiting for what I accept as actuality to make a play for my emotions.

I decided it was Saturday and even felt confident enough about it not to check the day on my newish watch with which, I have to admit I am already bored.  Although the watch is all white leather and metal trimmings and truncated oval and digital, it doesn’t quite have that “summer” look that I was seeking for the next few months.

However I lay in until the demands of age and liquid dispersal demanded my movement and, as I never fail to tell myself lying in bed until 8.30am is a lie-in of two hours for me!

As tomorrow is Toni’s nephew’s birthday, today was waiting for a section of The Family to arrive to buy the youngster’s present.  This has taken the form of a Barça shirt – the new Barça shirt.  This child sized scrap of material cost an astonishing amount of money and, even more astonishingly if we had had the version which had two adverts on the arms it would have been double the price!  For bloody adverts!

I, however, kept my mouth shut.  Where Barça is concerned silence is golden and allows life to continue whereas . . .  So the shirt was bought and a number (at extra expense) was added to the back.

I have to admit that the form of the number was quite stylish and elegant with a small Barça shield emblazoned on it as well – so easily worth the money.  (See above.)

The party for this very young human is going to be held in some sort of farm building in the country.  My mind immediately sprang to the conclusion that this location was to lessen the environmental impact of a whole group of young humans screaming and wrecking in the same area.

I refused to go.

The only reason to tolerate these gathering of feral egomaniacs is if you are directly related by blood to at least a few of the participants in these occasions that remind people of the importance of family planning.

I am not related by blood to anyone there and I am shell-shocked enough as it is with the weight and extent of marking which I drag around with me at the moment without undergoing the further torture of a so-called “party” where shrieking banshees howling their injustices to the world make Goya’s Black Paintings of witches covens look like delicate representations of genteel vicarage garden tea parties.

Toni’s mother tried to persuade me to go by saying that the “party” was going to be held in a big field and that there would be no necessity to be near the perpetrators.  I am not, however taken in my such Jesuitical casuistry.  I know from harsh experience that any meeting of adults is only as mature as the youngest child in the gathering.

I have sat with responsible adults watching with spellbound wonder a small child fail to walk properly.  

The only thing that kept me sane was watching with incredulous scientific detachment the looks of “genuine” interest and satisfaction on the faces of the other grown-ups at this display of uncoordinated ineptitude.  I, of course, kept a smile of innocent wonder stapled hypocritically to my face during the whole “performance” so that no casual glance of a besotted adult would see anything other than radiant satisfaction illuminate my countenance.

A party of a whole collection of neophyte humans acting with the certain knowledge that they are more important than me – not really to be countenanced!

So I have a weekend at home reading and watching programmes on the IPad and reading the Guardian and The Week also on the IPad.

Who could ask for more!